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June 8, 2012

HumanEvents.com now on WordPress

Today, inSourceCode launched HumanEvents.com on WordPress. The site was previously hosted on a home-grown content management system that had evolved over the course of 10 years to grow with their business. We were hired to take the site to best-in-class to create a competitive advantage in the DC media landscape. As a national brand which provides news to millions of Americans the focus was on-time, speed and ease-of-use.

Major upgrades include:

  • Permalinks – prior to the move to WordPress, the site used URLs like humanevents.com/article.php?id=43243. Now, the URLS look like humanevents.com/2011/04/30/the-president-and-the-preachers/
  • Page Speed – using advanced caching, minification, and theme optimization the new site now ranks faster than all other competitor (according to Google’s Page Speed test)
  • Featured Stories Options – the content team at Human Events asked for options to help readers more easily navigate through the top stories. We implemented options with rotators, static images and a full width headline so the editorial staff can better present the news.
  • Google Fonts – The new designs required better fonts. So we leaned on Google to handle the font loads. This speeds up page speed and gives the design a boost with sharper fonts.
  • Tags – WordPress uses tags to increase indexed pages and improve navigation. Pages like: humanevents.com/tag/mitt-romney/ didn’t exist before.
  • Facebook Comments – we implemented the Facebook comment system into the blog to encourage Facebook sharing and discussions.

We also added a custom plug-in that allows the site’s millions of visitors to leave feedback directly on any page. This will help us ensure that all parts are working as expected.

Update (July 14, 2012): Based on user feedback we have moved back to Disqus for comments. Many users commented via the floating Feedback button to share their dislike in moving away from Disqus for comments. To better serve the community of readers, we implemented a toggle that allows both Disqus and Facebook commenting.

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